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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 812
EAN num: 9780822208211
ISBN number: 0822208210
Label: Dramatist's Play Service
Manufacturer: Dramatist's Play Service
Printing Date: 1998-01
Publishing house: Dramatist's Play Service
Sale Popularity Level: 259332
Studio: Dramatist's Play Service
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'night, Mother is a taut and fluid drama that addresses different emotions and special relations. By one of America's most talented playwrights, this play won the Dramatists Guild's prestigious Hull-Warriner Award, four Tony nominations, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.
'night, Mother had its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in December 1982. It opened on Broadway in March 1983, directed by Tom Moore and starring Anne Pitoniak and Kathy Bates; a film, starring Anne Bancroft and Sissy Spacek, was released in 1986.
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Rated by buyers -
`Night Mother, a 1983 Pulitzer Prize winning play deserves just that! This one act play with simply two characters was unlike something I have read. The play draws on emotional dialogue, an unpleasant subject of suicide and the challenge to convince one not to do it. What is prize winning about the dramatic story is the realistic conversational tones and often painful sounds. It is the exchange of normal everyday dialogue, intermixed with riveting rationalization, pleading, bargaining, and coming to terms with life as it shall be. For the theatrical onstage drama, a clock is visible to the audience that indicates the action takes place in one evening and with no intermission. Time is of the essence.
The drama takes place in the early 80's in a small home, and one main character is Jessie, a 40ish woman with epilepsy, was deserted by her husband, and her son is a teenage criminal whose whereabouts are unknown. The only other character is her mother, whom Jessie lives with and Jessie, somewhat, does caregiving.
In the midst of Jessie carefully and strategically planning her suicide, she is nonchalantly taking care of last minute obligations for her mother, like doing mother's nails. Included in the planning, is a list of instructions so mother can locate everything needed after Jessie's suicide takes place. As mother tries to reason and rationalize and beg, Jessie conducts herself normally, making the preparations and letting nothing interfere. Here, we learn about Jessie, her dead father, why she was deserted, her son, and much more. Then the author transfers the dialogue with brilliancy..... This is wonderful, sad, emotional and powerful.
Movie version with superb acting!
See the movie version with Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft. It is rare that I see a version that equals the book! This is powerful. 'night, Mother.
Another wonderful play about death and dying is by Michael
Cristofer, a Pulitzer Prize Shadow Box: A Drama in Two Acts and the film version directed by Paul Newman The Shadow Box. It examines the 5stages of grieving one goes through as they are dying. These stages are also displayed by the living members, the loved ones. Rizzo
Rated by buyers -
I thoroughly enjoyed this play. I watched the film awhile back, and since I wanted to change choose different films for my Film Appreciation class, I decided to review the play before adding 'Night, Mother to my list. What a powerful play. It sheds light on a very difficult subject. Jesse, the main character, makes the decision to "get off the bus early" after careful thought. She shows that some people contemplate this critical experience probably more carefully than buying a house or a car. Her decision is hardly spontaneous or emotional, nothing that I imagined at all. The power of the read helped me to decide to buy the video later on. I also ended up buying a collection of Marsha Norman's other plays, hoping that I will duplicate the insight gained by reading this play.
Rated by buyers -
"'night, Mother" is a tour de force conversation between a mother, Thelma, and her daughter, Jessie, who has just told her that she is going to commit suicide at the end of the night. The play is a taut high-wire act that leaves you spellbound as Thelma tries to convince her daughter not to go through with it and Jessie sternly insists. Thelma and Jessie are extremely dimensional, deep characters with an achingly believable relationship. Through the course of their conversation it becomes apparent that there is a yawning chasm between them despite their seeming closeness, and while Thelma thinks that the two can put it right Jessie doesn't believe it -- or want to try. The fierce, emotional back-and-forth between Mother and daughter keeps you on the edge of your seat. The dialogue is very natural and believable, and the playwright, Marsha Norman, displays an extraordinary acuity for what her characters are feeling and have gone through to reach this point. Norman has crafted a devastating portrait of two women that leaves an enormous impact on the reader. I only finished it two hours ago, but I seriously doubt that "night, Mother" will be leaving my thoughts any time soon. Highly recommended -- but keep the Kleenex on hand, just in case.
Rated by buyers -
Marsha Norman's 1983 Pulitizer Prize-winning 'NIGHT, MOTHER is frequently described as a play "about suicide." Although the play does indeed deal with suicide, this is actually a shallow designation; it is about a lot of things, but most particularly control: who has it, who wants it, and the extent a person will go to obtain it.
The play involves two characters: Thelma, an elderly woman, and Jessie, her middle-aged daughter. They have lived together in an isolated house on a rural road for a number of years. Thelma describes herself as "a plain country woman;" she enjoys life in a fundamental way, not expecting more than she already knows, watching television, knitting, nibbling at sweets, and enjoying regular visits from her son and his family. Jessie, who suffers from epilepsy and is divorced, has become something of a recluse, and her life consists largely of managing her mother's home and thinking on the past. One evening, as the play begins, Jessie informs Thelma that she has decided to kill herself right after she gives Thelma her weekly manicure.
Thelma does not take Jessie seriously at first; clearly there have been too many scenes between the two for Jessie's statement to have any real meaning for her. But Jessie is serious indeed, and over the course of an hour and a half the play evolves into a battle of wits, Jessie determined to kill herself, Thelma equally determined to prevent her from it. In the process, we learn quite a bit about the family and their lives and the various emotional and factual secrets the women have hidden from each other over the years.
The play is brilliantly constructed, performed in "real time" without any scene changes or intermission; the characters--and the equally vivid people they discuss but whom we never see--are equally well rendered. There are moments are laughter, even more moments of insight, but the play is progressively intense, progressively dark, with all the power of a noose that slowly tightens around your neck. One of the most fearsome bits of theatre of the past thirty years or so, easily the equal of such legendary works as Albee's WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Recommended.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
Rated by buyers -
This is one of my favorite plays of all time. it's a great discusion on the issue of suicide. There's one line Ive always remebered: When the daughter is trying to justify the idea that she wants to off herslef, and she uses an illustration of someone riding the bus and riding the bus, and they could just stay on and ride it around the block another round, but why bother. It's really well written, and how the mother and dauther get along is interesting.
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